The Ghost Road

The 1995 Booker Prize-winning novel that completes the Regeneration Trilogy

The last work in Pat Barker's renowned trilogy of World War I literature is The Ghost Road. The last few months of the most needlessly brutal of contemporary wars provide the setting for the story. Millions of troops fighting in the bloody trench combat in France are all "ghosts in the making." William Rivers, an English psychologist, cures the war's psychological victims to restore them to full health so they might fight once again, despite intense moral guilt. Billy Prior, an officer who rose from the working class, is brave and cynical. He chooses to fight a war he no longer believes in and returns to France with poet Wilfred Owen, another soldier. Flu-stricken, Rivers thinks back on his time spent researching a South Pacific tribe whose way of life was essentially a culture of death. As they continue to live apart from one other, Rivers makes connections that broaden both our and his perspectives on war.

The Ghost Road simultaneously encompasses and transcends history by fusing lyrical intensity with gritty reality, cutting comedy with tragic drama, and a journey toward a finale that is both inevitable and sad. It's a work of contemporary art.